Dear Sandra,

By all means, accept those invitations and start using LinkedIn, the single most valuable online resource for job seekers. The basic concept of LinkedIn is simple. LinkedIn lets you create an online “Professional Profile”, with your work history, education, skill set, accomplishments, recommendations, and even an optional photo. It also lets you connect (or “link”) your profile to those of other professionals that you know. By tracking that information, LinkedIn leverages the relationship power of “Six Degrees of Separation”, helping you connect to friends of your friends, and even friends of THOSE friends.

How is that useful to you in your job search? Let me play David Letterman for a moment and give you my Top Ten Ways You Should Be Using LinkedIn:

1. Posting your professional profile – First and foremost, LinkedIn has become THE web site where executives, recruiters, and hiring managers look to find career information about you. If your profile is not on LinkedIn, then in their eyes, you might as well not exist. Many job seekers now include the addresses of their LinkedIn profile pages on their business cards, email signatures, and resume headers, to make it all the easier for employers to find them.
2. Displaying professional recommendations from colleagues – In addition to your career history, your LinkedIn profile has space to display recommendations written by your colleagues. Professional recommendations are among the most valuable credentials a job seeker can have.
3. Maintaining up-to-date contact with your network – As your colleagues change jobs and move locations, the business cards in your rolodex become outdated and obsolete. LinkedIn gives you a way to automatically stay connected with your contacts, no matter how often they move.
4. Communicating status updates with your network – The status update section of your profile is an effective way for you to keep your colleagues informed of what is going on with your professional life and job search, without having to do mass emails to everyone in your network.
5. Joining professional interest groups – LinkedIn now hosts thousands of online discussion groups for people who share common professional interests. They are great forums for colleagues to share industry news, best practices, and even job leads.
6. Getting job postings with connections to the recruiters – LinkedIn’s “Jobs” section contains thousands of exclusive job listings, most of which include profile information for the recruiter posting the opening. In that way, you can discover if you have a personal connection to that recruiter. The recruiter in turn, can also find people who will vouch for your qualifications, greatly increasing your chances of being considered.
7. Researching target companies – LinkedIn’s “Companies” tab lets you search for companies by industry, keywords, size, and location. It then displays a wealth of information that you cannot find on any other web site, including profiles of current and past employees, recent hires and job changes, and even exclusive job postings.
8. Finding contacts in target companies – LinkedIn’s “People” search tab lets you search for people in your extended network who work at companies you are interested in. It can then show you which of your friends connects you to those inside contacts.
9. Getting introduced to those contacts – Once you have identified key contacts in those companies, LinkedIn can help you connect to them using a built-in “Get Introduced Through a Connection” feature. You use that to compose an email that gets forwarded to your target contact via one of their trusted colleagues. That greatly increases your chances of getting a response.
10. Researching profiles of interviewers and key executives – One of the most effective ways to build rapport on a job interview is to find a common touchstone with the interviewer. Before the interview, you can use LinkedIn to research the interviewer’s profile and find out if you know the same people, went to the same school, or share the same interests.

Remember, Sandra, that the key to job search success is not what you know. It’s who you know, and even more importantly, who knows you. There is no better tool on the internet for extending your network and enhancing your professional visibility than LinkedIn. Get on there ASAP, and use it every way you can. Good luck!